2008-06-27

Eclipse Ganymede OutOfMemoryError

The new version of Eclipse is out now: Ganymede. I installed it and most things seem to work fine. The only problem I had was getting an OutOfMemoryError when starting a second Eclipse instance with the Eclipse plugins I develop. This error occurs in the second Eclipse instance after activating some of the plugins by GUI interaction. Normally, such an error can be solved by increasing the maximum heap size the JVM can use with the VM argument -Xmx. The default size is 128m and usually -Xmx256m is enough for my purposes.

However, in this case, increasing the heap size did not solve the problem. The error that occurred was not the typical OutOfMemoryError. The total heap size was big enough but the PermGen region was too small. This was indicated by the error's message:java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

To solve this error, I had to increase this region's size with this VM argument (the default size is 64m):-XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Über mich

I am a PhD student at the department of computer science at the Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. My thesis topic is "Test-Driven Language Modeling". You can read more about it on my professional homepage.